Everyone knows the story of the emperor’s new clothes, but I think they miss the point of it. As Hans Christian Andersen told it, two con-men told the king their cloth was invisible to stupid people, so everyone pretended they saw it to avoid appearing stupid. It took a child to blurt out that he was naked. But everyone forgets the end of the story: The emperor carries on as if nothing had happened.
I was reminded of this by the Republican reaction to Weirdgate. In case you’ve been bingeing the Olympics and missed it, Democrats, led by Kamala Harris and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, began calling Republicans “weird.” It turned the politiscape on its head. It went viral, in large part because they are weird. Why are they obsessed with other people’s genders and sex lives? Why are they obsessed with forced birth? Why do they want to ban contraception? And it back-footed conservatives, who have tried to carry on as if nobody was aware of their nakedness. Shouting back, “No, you’re weird” and running pictures of trans people just reminds everybody that you’re a bunch of sexually insecure bigots.
Speaking of sexually insecure bigots, Elon Musk’s husk of Twitter suspended the White Dudes for Harris account after it raised $4 million and refused to say why. Yet almost all so-called legitimate journalists continue to use what’s now a propaganda platform.
The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, its toxic plan for a fascist takeover of the United States, has turned out to be – who could have guessed? – wildly unpopular. Donald Trump keeps saying he hasn’t read it, which I totally believe, but it was assembled by dozens of people who were in his administration and hope to be again. It didn’t help, so now they shitcanned the guy who came up with the brilliant idea of gathering all the nuts of the forest, no matter how rancid.
The floor’s yours.